I just happened to spot this book on the “new books” shelf at the library last month, and grabbed it, because I like Karen Armstrong’s writing.

I read through it quickly, and I was trying to read so many other things at the same time that I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. She does write a lot about interpretation of the Bible through the ages, and she uses the scary Greek terms like “exegesis” and “hermeneutics” a lot, which make the reading a bit challenging. She does provide a glossary to define these terms.

I think the main idea I’ve come away with, which she develops through the book and summarizes in the last chapter, is that some of the greatest exegetes [interpreters] of the past, including Hillel, Jesus, Paul, Johanan Ben Zakkai, Akiba, and Augustine, insisted that charity and loving kindness were essential to Biblical interpretation. And she asks this question at the end: “What would it mean to interpret the whole of the Bible as a ‘commentary’ on the Golden Rule?” Good question.

The Mindful Way Through Depression has been a wonderfully helpful book for me. I found it in the new book section of my local library, including a meditation CD. The book is very clearly written, and outlines a program for covering the material. The main message of the book is that meditation is a tool that one can learn and use to combat the bad habit of ruminative thinking, where we try to think our way out of depression by regretting the past and worrying about the future and end up even more depressed. In the past two weeks, I have put what I’ve learned to the test in order to get through a bout with shingles, a disease involving the nerves that seems almost like a stress barometer. The more stressed I feel, the more I hurt. So, the disease has given me the opportunity to practice the meditation techniques I’ve learned, and then has given me instantaneous feedback as to whether I’m doing it right or not. It’s not that pain goes away entirely; it’s that I learn not to add anything extra to the pain by worrying and fretting and panicking. I’m thankful to have read this book and hope to keep practicing its principles.

Today, as I write about Amish Grace, yet another tragic school shooting, this time at Northern Illinois University, is in the news. This book explores an event that took place in October 2006, where a non-Amish man shot several young Amish girls in cold blood at an elementary school near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The local Amish community was so quick to forgive the killer’s family that this story superceded the story of the shooting. The book discusses how and why the Amish have forgiven in this and other circumstances, and yet how they can shun their own friends and family members who fail to conform with the Ordnung, the Amish rules of order. My book group had voted to study this book, and it did lead to some interesting discussions.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) is a book that I found on the new book shelf at my local library. The part of the book that really spoke to me (and made me feel very uncomfortable) was the chapter about marriages and relationships. Having gone through a divorce, I know it is so much easier and more satisfying to blame the other partner for the failure, and so much harder and uncomfortable to take a square look at the mistakes that I’ve made, not to mention admitting them to others or attempting to make amends for them. But that is the whole point of the book: that, especially in our culture today, we are almost blind about extent to which we go to blame others for mistakes and to justify our own.

Revelation, a novel, is an expansion of a short story by author Peggy Payne called “The Pure in Heart.” I read the short story in a book discussion group several months ago and enjoyed it, so I ordered the novel through the Georgia Pines interlibrary loan system. It took about 2 months to get the book, but it did finally arrive. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the short story. (Maybe the problem was that I wasn’t feeling well when I read it.)

While waiting for the book, I’ve found that I enjoy reading Peggy Payne’s Boldness Blog.

Bread Alone is a novel about a woman going through a divorce. A friend of mine pulled her copy off her family-room bookshelf, and told me that she liked how the author incorporated recipes and bread-baking wisdom into the story of a woman re-building her life. I told her about my “bake bread” goal on 43-things, and my story about the results of my recent experiment in bread-baking. So, I took the novel home and was surprised at how many parallels there were between the story of the main character, “Wyn,” who must re-build her life after an unwanted divorce, and my own. Unfortunately, I was more depressed than hopeful after finishing the book. Everything just falls into place in the story, and within a year, Wyn has embarked on her new life, in a new city, with a new business, a new lover, and a new understanding of her parents.

I may try some of the recipes. And I do like the quotation that opens the book:

Upside down I may take shape.
I may become resilient.
Kneaded, turned on end
I will become less
And somehow more myself.
^{from BECOMING BREAD by Gunilla Norris}

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of this short book several months ago, and I’ve read it several times since then. I’m returning it today.

I wrote a story about it here.

I visited a friend yesterday who was recovering from an outpatient surgical procedure. She wanted to watch a movie, and chose Michael Moore’s “Sicko” from the cable “On Demand” menu. I stayed to watch it with her. She was disappointed, because she had thought it was going to be a comedy.

This movie is not a comedy. It takes on the very serious subject of problems with health care insurance coverage in our country. I had heard and read so much about this movie when it was first released that I almost felt like I’d already seen it before. This movie was very uncomfortable for me to watch, because I have many unanswered questions about my own health insurance eligibility since my divorce, as well as concerns for uninsured friends and relatives.

Many years ago, I heard David Sedaris on the radio, reading selections from his “Santaland Diaries” about his Christmas job as an elf in Macy’s department store. I thought it was quite hilarious. Then several years ago, I bought this book on tape as a Christmas gift for a good friend who loves comedy. After listening to the tapes, she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, and gave them back to me. Ever since then, I’ve worried about what was on the tapes, imagining something horribly obnoxious or obscene, that had really offended her. But I never actually got around to listening to the tapes myself. Finally, after finding the tapes earlier this month, I decided to listen to them. Thankfully, I didn’t find anything horrible or embarrassing.

A couple months ago, our book group discussed a story by Alice Munro called “Pictures of the Ice,” published in God Stories. This led me to borrow Selected Stories from the local library, which contains 28 more stories by Alice Munro. I’ve been consuming the stories haphazardly, by opening the book randomly before bed and reading until I fall asleep. Most of the stories are set in Canada, often in Ontario.

The very first story that I read was called “The Turkey Season.” I think it was memorable because I read it right before Thanksgiving, and it graphically descibes the work of a group of “turkey gutters” at a small turkey-processing operation in cold, snowy rural Ontario.

Several of the last stories I read contained descriptions of failed marriages or relationships that really moved me, as though the author was writing about me and my experience. One of the stories, called “Dulse,” tells a story about Lydia, a divorced woman who has just ended another long-term relationship and now is on vacation on an island off New Brunswick and noticing “that people were no longer so interested in getting to know her.” When she describes how she felt at the end of her last relationship, she is describing me at times during the past year or so. A short excerpt: ”...she could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself, so that getting up and leaving the car, going up the steps, going along the street all seemed to involve a bizarre effort. She thought afterwards that she had been seized up, as machines are said to be…”